After years of delays, Oakland is updating its decades-old 911 dispatch technology – NBC Bay Area

Oakland leaders on Thursday announced successful hardware and software upgrades to decades-old 911 technology. As a result, they said Oaklanders should have a more reliable emergency call system and 911 response times should ultimately improve.

This movement is a A series of reports from NBC Bay AreaThe Investigative Division reports that the Oakland Police Department has the worst emergency call response time among 440 911 centers across California.

As of Thursday, Oakland Police Department was receiving 51% of 911 calls within the state’s 15-second standard. Oakland should be at 90%, according to the state.

State data analyzed by NBC Bay Area shows that as of June 2024, the Oakland Police Department’s average response time to 911 is 50 seconds. That’s still the longest in California. 50 seconds is more than three times the state’s 15-second requirement.

The second-longest is CHP Golden Gate’s communications center, which serves a larger area and has an average response time of 25.8 seconds. CHP Golden Gate has cut response times by more than half since last year. Oakland’s progress was significantly slower, the data shows.

At the Oakland Police Department’s 911 emergency center on Thursday, Mayor Sheng Thao, the city’s IT Director Tony Batalla and 911 director Gina Cheng announced the first major upgrade to Oakland’s 911 computer-aided dispatch system in more than 20 years.

But it happened full of delaysOakland City Council first approved the $12.8 million renovation project in 2017, seven years ago.

Since then, the project has been plagued with problems and has been slammed in two Alameda County civil grand jury reports. One of them said that if the city continued to delay the upgrades, it would “risk a catastrophic failure” and that the dispatcher would “go back to pen and pencil.” That happened last summer. Oakland said it was due to a power outage.

IT Director Batalla said the new system will help prevent such an emergency outage from happening again.

“The infrastructure is running in a data facility here in Oakland called Digital Realty Trust. It’s a commercial data center facility. It’s built to withstand any power outage. It’s extremely secure, both digitally and physically. And that means we’ve taken great steps to implement a reliable, secure, and resilient infrastructure,” Batalla said.